Xpiaani'

Xpiaani’: His understanding, his discernment, his consciousness, his enlightenment, his notion, his reason, his intelligence, his judgment.

We look, almost always, to recognize the other. We look, sometimes, in unison. We look to find the gaze, to hold it, to look at ourselves and recognize ourselves in a certain way in the eyes of the other; I look at the other, nodding to what I am, but also to what I am not. But, what happens when we encounter the complex world of another whom we do not know how to recognize?

Juana brings us into the world of Cosijopii, through a process of exploration and recognition of the everyday and magical moments in which she accompanies and photographs her son with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). They are not a collection of signs that lead us to a diagnosis. On the contrary, she brings us closer to an intimate, complex world that speaks to us of that being, who divides his world between colors, sounds, games, repetitions, and constructions that make up his xpiaani.

In this work, Juana’s gaze is dual: on the one hand, it is gentle and accompanies us, and on the other, it confronts us. It is a kind of prism that refracts, reflects, and decomposes colors on the wall—a child’s game that allows us to guess where colors come from, why light passes through them, and how color-moments are created in a way that is inexplicable to the tender eyes of a child. We are surprised to recognize ourselves in those small daily moments, which transport us back to our childhood or a childhood we have lost, and which these images gently return to us while we scribble on the walls, reproducing experiences and memories of the body.

Although perhaps we have already been moved by that first memory of Juana holding her son in a river, as he slowly discovers his movements in this new water, in this new world.

And when Juana confronts us, we find ourselves in those eyes that discover you looking at her son wrapped in a kind of cocoon, distant and protected from that prying gaze. But she also looks us in the eyes with her son in her arms, both naked in an embrace that holds, that holds her, and that finds us. While she tells us: “In my mind, I have engraved beautiful songs of a child, like a bolt of lightning, with wind, falling with force onto the damp earth.” That lightning falls, the sound doubles and replicates in the corners, it transforms into a cricket, into a train, into an echo that accompanies our journey through our own childhood-memory.

— Curatorship and text: Karina Juárez